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    Community members receive 2024 MIT Excellence Awards, Collier Medal, and Staff Award for Distinction in Service

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    On Wednesday, June 5, 13 individuals and four teams were awarded MIT Excellence Awards — the highest awards for staff at the Institute. Colleagues holding signs, waving pompoms, and cheering gathered in Kresge Auditorium to show their support for the honorees. In addition to the Excellence Awards, staff members were honored with the Collier Medal, the Staff Award for Distinction in Service, and the Gordon Y. Billard Award. The Collier Medal honors the memory of Officer Sean Collier, who gave his life protecting and serving MIT; it celebrates an individual or group whose actions demonstrate the importance of community. The Staff Award for Distinction in Service is presented to a staff member whose service results in a positive lasting impact on the Institute.The Gordon Y. Billard Award is given annually to staff, faculty, or an MIT-affiliated individual(s) who has given “special service of outstanding merit performed for the Institute.” This year, for the first time, this award was presented at the MIT Excellence Awards and Collier Medal celebration. The 2024 MIT Excellence Award recipients and their award categories are: Innovative Solutions Nanotechnology Material Core Staff, Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Office of the Vice President for Research (Margaret Bisher, Giovanni de Nola, David Mankus, and Dong Soo Yun)Bringing Out the Best Salvatore Ieni James Kelsey Lauren PouchakServing Our Community Megan Chester Alessandra Davy-Falconi David Randall Days Weekend Team, Department of Custodial Services, Department of Facilities: Karen Melisa Betancourth, Ana Guerra Chavarria, Yeshi Khando, Joao Pacheco, and Kevin Salazar IMES/HST Academic Office Team, Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, School of Engineering: Traci Anderson, Joseph R. Stein, and Laurie Ward Team Leriche, Department of Custodial Services, Department of Facilities: Anthony Anzalone, David Solomon Carrasco, Larrenton Forrest, Michael Leriche, and Joe VieiraEmbracing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Bhaskar Pant Jessica TamOutstanding Contributor Paul W. Barone Marcia G. Davidson Steven Kooi Tianjiao Lei Andrew H. Mack

    2024 MIT Excellence Awards + Collier Medal Ceremony

    The 2024 Collier Medal recipient was Benjamin B. Lewis, a graduate student in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Last spring, he founded the Cambridge branch of End Overdose, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing drug-related overdose deaths. Through his efforts, more than 600 members of the Greater Boston community, including many at MIT, have been trained to administer lifesaving treatment at critical moments.This year’s recipient of the 2024 Staff Award for Distinction in Service was Diego F. Arango (Department of Custodial Services, Department of Facilities), daytime custodian in Building 46. He was nominated by no fewer than 36 staff, faculty, students, and researchers for creating a positive working environment and for offering “help whenever, wherever, and to whomever needs it.”Three community members were honored with a 2024 Gordon Y. Billard AwardDeborah G. Douglas, senior director of collections and curator of science and technology, MIT MuseumRonald Hasseltine, assistant provost for research administration, Office of the Vice President for ResearchRichard K. Lester, vice provost for international activities and Japan Steel Industry Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, School of EngineeringPresenters included President Sally Kornbluth; MIT Chief of Police John DiFava and Deputy Chief Steven DeMarco; Vice President for Human Resources Ramona Allen; Executive Vice President and Treasurer Glen Shor; Provost Cynthia Barnhart; Lincoln Laboratory director Eric Evans; Chancellor Melissa Nobles; and Dean of the School of Engineering Anantha Chandrakasan.Visit the MIT Human Resources website for more information about the award recipients, categories, and to view photos and video of the event. More

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      Fotini Christia named director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

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      Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Political Science, has been named the new director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), effective July 1.“Fotini is well-positioned to guide IDSS into the next chapter. With her tenure as the director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center and as an associate director of IDSS since 2020, she has actively forged connections between the social sciences, data science, and computation,” says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I eagerly anticipate the ways in which she will advance and champion IDSS in alignment with the spirit and mission of the Schwarzman College of Computing.”“Fotini’s profound expertise as a social scientist and her adept use of data science, computational tools, and novel methodologies to grasp the dynamics of societal evolution across diverse fields, makes her a natural fit to lead IDSS,” says Asu Ozdaglar, deputy dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.Christia’s research has focused on issues of conflict and cooperation in the Muslim world, for which she has conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, the Palestinian Territories, and Yemen, among others. More recently, her research has been directed at examining how to effectively integrate artificial intelligence tools in public policy.She was appointed the director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC) and an associate director of IDSS in October 2020. SSRC, an interdisciplinary center housed within IDSS in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, focuses on the study of high-impact, complex societal challenges that shape our world.As part of IDSS, she is co-organizer of a cross-disciplinary research effort, the Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism. Bringing together faculty and researchers from all of MIT’s five schools and the college, the initiative builds on extensive social science literature on systemic racism and uses big data to develop and harness computational tools that can help effect structural and normative change toward racial equity across housing, health care, policing, and social media. Christia is also chair of IDSS’s doctoral program in Social and Engineering Systems.Christia is the author of “Alliance Formation in Civil War” (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which was awarded the Luebbert Award for Best Book in Comparative Politics, the Lepgold Prize for Best Book in International Relations, and a Distinguished Book Award from the International Studies Association. She is co-editor with Graeme Blair (University of California, Los Angeles) and Jeremy Weinstein (incoming dean at Harvard Kennedy School) of “Crime, Insecurity, and Community Policing: Experiments on Building Trust,” forthcoming in August 2024 with Cambridge University Press.Her research has also appeared in Science, Nature Human Behavior, Review of Economic Studies, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, NeurIPs, Communications Medicine, IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, American Political Science Review, and Annual Review of Political Science, among other journals. Her opinion pieces have been published in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other outlets.A native of Greece, where she grew up in the port city of Salonika, Christia moved to the United States to attend college at Columbia University. She graduated magna cum laude in 2001 with a joint BA in economics–operations research and an MA in international affairs. She joined the MIT faculty in 2008 after receiving her PhD in public policy from Harvard University.Christia succeeds Noelle Selin, a professor in IDSS and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. Selin has led IDSS as interim director for the 2023-24 academic year since July 2023, following Professor Martin Wainwright.“I am incredibly grateful to Noelle for serving as interim director this year. Her contributions in this role, as well as her time leading the Technology and Policy Program, have been invaluable. I’m delighted she will remain part of the IDSS community as a faculty member,” says Huttenlocher. More

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      Celebrating the impact of IDSS

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      The “interdisciplinary approach” is something that has been lauded for decades for its ability to break down silos and create new integrated approaches to research.

      For Munther Dahleh, founding director of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), showing the community that data science and statistics can transcend individual disciplines and form a new holistic approach to addressing complex societal challenges has been crucial to the institute’s success.

      “From the very beginning, it was critical that we recognized the areas of data science, statistics, AI, and, in a way, computing, as transdisciplinary,” says Dahleh, who is the William A. Coolidge Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We made that point over and over — these are areas that embed in your field. It is not ours; this organization is here for everyone.”

      On April 14-15, researchers from across and beyond MIT joined together to celebrate the accomplishments and impact IDSS has had on research and education since its inception in 2015. Taking the place of IDSS’s annual statistics and data science conference SDSCon, the celebration also doubled as a way to recognize Dahleh for his work creating and executing the vision of IDSS as he prepares to step down from his director position this summer.

      In addition to talks and panels on statistics and computation, smart systems, automation and artificial intelligence, conference participants discussed issues ranging from climate change, health care, and misinformation. Nobel Prize winner and IDSS affiliate Professor Esther Duflo spoke on large scale immunization efforts, former MLK Visiting Professor Craig Watkins joined a panel on equity and justice in AI, and IDSS Associate Director Alberto Abadie discussed synthetic controls for policy evaluation. Other policy questions were explored through lightning talks, including those by students from the Technology and Policy Program (TPP) within IDSS.

      A place to call home

      The list of IDSS accomplishments over the last eight years is long and growing. From creating a home for 21st century statistics at MIT after other unsuccessful attempts, to creating a new PhD preparing the trilingual student who is an expert in data science and social science in the context of a domain, to playing a key role in determining an effective process for Covid testing in the early days of the pandemic, IDSS has left its mark on MIT. More recently, IDSS launched an initiative using big data to help effect structural and normative change toward racial equity, and will continue to explore societal challenges through the lenses of statistics, social science, and science and engineering.

      “I’m very proud of what we’ve done and of all the people who have contributed to this. The leadership team has been phenomenal in their commitment and their creativity,” Dahleh says. “I always say it doesn’t take one person, it takes the village to do what we have done, and I am very proud of that.”

      Prior to the institute’s formation, Dahleh and others at MIT were brought together to answer one key question: How would MIT prepare for the future of systems and data?

      “Data science is a complex area because in some ways it’s everywhere and it belongs to everyone, similar to statistics and AI,” Dahleh says “The most important part of creating an organization to support it was making it clear that it was an organization for everyone.” The response the team came back with was to build an Institute: a department that could cross all other departments and schools.

      While Dahleh and others on the committee were creating this blueprint for the future, the events that would lead early IDSS hires like Caroline Uhler to join the team were also beginning to take shape. Uhler, now an MIT professor of computer science and co-director of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute, was a panelist at the celebration discussing statistics and human health.

      In 2015, Uhler was a faculty member at the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria looking to move back to the U.S. “I was looking for positions in all different types of departments related to statistics, including electrical engineering and computer science, which were areas not related to my degree,” Uhler says. “What really got me to MIT was Munther’s vision for building a modern type of statistics, and the unique opportunity to be part of building what statistics should be moving forward.”

      The breadth of the Statistics and Data Science Center has given it a unique and a robust character that makes for an attractive collaborative environment at MIT. “A lot of IDSS’s impact has been in giving people like me a home,” Uhler adds. “By building an institute for statistics that is across all schools instead of housed within a single department, it has created a home for everyone who is interested in the field.”

      Filling the gap

      For Ali Jadbabaie, former IDSS associate director and another early IDSS hire, being in the right place at the right time landed him in the center of it all. A control theory expert and network scientist by training, Jadbabaie first came to MIT during a sabbatical from his position as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

      “My time at MIT coincided with the early discussions around forming IDSS and given my experience they asked me to stay and help with its creation,” Jadbabaie says. He is now head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, and he spoke at the celebration about a new MIT major in climate system science and engineering.

      A critical early accomplishment of IDSS was the creation of a doctoral program in social and engineering systems (SES), which has the goal of educating and fostering the success of a new type of PhD student, says Jadbabaie.

      “We realized we had this opportunity to educate a new type of PhD student who was conversant in the math of information sciences and statistics in addition to an understanding of a domain — infrastructures, climate, political polarization — in which problems arise,” he says. “This program would provide training in statistics and data science, the math of information sciences and a branch of social science that is relevant to their domain.”

      “SES has been filling a gap,” adds Jadbabaie. “We wanted to bring quantitative reasoning to areas in social sciences, particularly as they interact with complex engineering systems.”

      “My first year at MIT really broadened my horizon in terms of what was available and exciting,” says Manxi Wu, a member of the first cohort of students in the SES program after starting out in the Master of Science in Transportation (MST) program. “My advisor introduced me to a number of interesting topics at the intersection of game theory, economics, and engineering systems, and in my second year I realized my interest was really about the societal scale systems, with transportation as my go-to application area when I think about how to make an impact in the real world.”

      Wu, now an assistant professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell, was a panelist at the Celebration’s session on smart infrastructure systems. She says that the beauty of the SES program lies in its ability to create a common ground between groups of students and researchers who all have different applications interests but share an eagerness to sharpen their technical skills.

      “While we may be working on very different application areas, the core methodologies, such as mathematical tools for data science and probability optimization, create a common language,” Wu says. “We are all capable of speaking the technical language, and our diversified interests give us even more to talk about.”

      In addition to the PhD program, IDSS has helped bring quality MIT programming to people around the globe with its MicroMasters Program in Statistics and Data Science (SDS), which recently celebrated the certification of over 1,000 learners. The MicroMasters is just one offering in the newly-minted IDSSx, a collection of online learning opportunities for learners at different skill levels and interests.

      “The impact of branding what MIT-IDSS does across the globe has been great,” Dahleh says. “In addition, we’ve created smaller online programs for continued education in data science and machine learning, which I think is also critical in educating the community at large.”

      Hopes for the future

      Through all of its accomplishments, the core mission of IDSS has never changed.

      “The belief was always to create an institute focused on how data science can be used to solve pressing societal problems,” Dahleh says. “The organizational structure of IDSS as an MIT Institute has enabled it to promote data and systems as a transdiciplinary area that embeds in every domain to support its mission. This reverse ownership structure will continue to strengthen the presence of IDSS in MIT and will make it an essential unit within the Schwarzman College of Computing.”

      As Dahleh prepares to step down from his role, and Professor Martin Wainwright gets ready to fill his (very big) shoes as director, Dahleh’s colleagues say the real key to the success of IDSS all started with his passion and vision.

      “Creating a new academic unit within MIT is actually next to impossible,” Jadbabaie says. “It requires structural changes, as well as someone who has a strong understanding of multiple areas, who knows how to get people to work together collectively, and who has a mission.”

      “The most important thing is that he was inclusive,” he adds. “He didn’t try to create a gate around it and say these people are in and these people are not. I don’t think this would have ever happened without Munther at the helm.” More

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      Martin Wainwright named director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

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      Martin Wainwright, the Cecil H. Green Professor in MIT’s departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Mathematics, has been named the new director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), effective July 1.

      “Martin is a widely recognized leader in statistics and machine learning — both in research and in education. In taking on this leadership role in the college, Martin will work to build up the human and institutional behavior component of IDSS, while strengthening initiatives in both policy and statistics, and collaborations within the institute, across MIT, and beyond,” says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I look forward to working with him and supporting his efforts in this next chapter for IDSS.”

      “Martin holds a strong belief in the value of theoretical, experimental, and computational approaches to research and in facilitating connections between them. He also places much importance in having practical, as well as academic, impact,” says Asu Ozdaglar, deputy dean of academics for the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, department head of EECS, and the MathWorks Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “As the new director of IDSS, he will undoubtedly bring these tenets to the role in advancing the mission of IDSS and helping to shape its future.”

      A principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and the Statistics and Data Science Center, Wainwright joined the MIT faculty in July 2022 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he held the Howard Friesen Chair with a joint appointment between the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Statistics.

      Wainwright received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and doctoral degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. He has received a number of awards and recognition, including an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and best paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, IEEE Communications Society, and IEEE Information Theory and Communication Societies. He has also been honored with the Medallion Lectureship and Award from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the COPSS Presidents’ Award from the Joint Statistical Societies. He was a section lecturer with the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014 and received the Blackwell Award from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2017.

      He is the author of “High-dimensional Statistics: A Non-Asymptotic Viewpoint” (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and is coauthor on several books, including on graphical models and on sparse statistical modeling.

      Wainwright succeeds Munther Dahleh, the William A. Coolidge Professor in EECS, who has helmed IDSS since its founding in 2015.

      “I am grateful to Munther and thank him for his leadership of IDSS. As the founding director, he has led the creation of a remarkable new part of MIT,” says Huttenlocher. More

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      New leadership at MIT’s Center for Biomedical Innovation

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      As it continues in its mission to improve global health through the development and implementation of biomedical innovation, the MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation (CBI) today announced changes to its leadership team: Stacy Springs has been named executive director, and Professor Richard Braatz has joined as the center’s new associate faculty director.

      The change in leadership comes at a time of rapid development in new therapeutic modalities, growing concern over global access to biologic medicines and healthy food, and widespread interest in applying computational tools and multi-disciplinary approaches to address long-standing biomedical challenges.

      “This marks an exciting new chapter for the CBI,” says faculty director Anthony J. Sinskey, professor of biology, who cofounded CBI in 2005. “As I look back at almost 20 years of CBI history, I see an exponential growth in our activities, educational offerings, and impact.”

      The center’s collaborative research model accelerates innovation in biotechnology and biomedical research, drawing on the expertise of faculty and researchers in MIT’s schools of Engineering and Science, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, and the MIT Sloan School of Management.

      Springs steps into the role of executive director having previously served as senior director of programs for CBI and as executive director of CBI’s Biomanufacturing Program and its Consortium on Adventitious Agent Contamination in Biomanufacturing (CAACB). She succeeds Gigi Hirsch, who founded the NEW Drug Development ParadIGmS (NEWDIGS) Initiative at CBI in 2009. Hirsch and NEWDIGS have now moved to Tufts Medical Center, establishing a headquarters at the new Center for Biomedical System Design within the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies there.

      Braatz, a chemical engineer whose work is informed by mathematical modeling and computational techniques, conducts research in process data analytics, design, and control of advanced manufacturing systems.

      “It’s been great to interact with faculty from across the Institute who have complementary expertise,” says Braatz, the Edwin R. Gilliland Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering. “Participating in CBI’s workshops has led to fruitful partnerships with companies in tackling industry-wide challenges.”

      CBI is housed under the Institute for Data Systems and Society and, specifically, the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. CBI is home to two biomanufacturing consortia: the CAACB and the Biomanufacturing Consortium (BioMAN). Through these precompetitive collaborations, CBI researchers work with biomanufacturers and regulators to advance shared interests in biomanufacturing.

      In addition, CBI researchers are engaged in several sponsored research programs focused on integrated continuous biomanufacturing capabilities for monoclonal antibodies and vaccines, analytical technologies to measure quality and safety attributes of a variety of biologics, including gene and cell therapies, and rapid-cycle development of virus-like particle vaccines for SARS-CoV-2.

      In another significant initiative, CBI researchers are applying data analytics strategies to biomanufacturing problems. “In our smart data analytics project, we are creating new decision support tools and algorithms for biomanufacturing process control and plant-level decision-making. Further, we are leveraging machine learning and natural language processing to improve post-market surveillance studies,” says Springs.

      CBI is also working on advanced manufacturing for cell and gene therapies, among other new modalities, and is a part of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology – Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine (SMART CAMP). SMART CAMP is an international research effort focused on developing the analytical tools and biological understanding of critical quality attributes that will enable the manufacture and delivery of improved cell therapies to patients.

      “This is a crucial time for biomanufacturing and for innovation across the health-care value chain. The collaborative efforts of MIT researchers and consortia members will drive fundamental discovery and inform much-needed progress in industry,” says MIT Vice President for Research Maria Zuber.

      “CBI has a track record of engaging with health-care ecosystem challenges. I am confident that under the new leadership, it will continue to inspire MIT, the United States, and the entire world to improve the health of all people,” adds Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. More

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      Caspar Hare, Georgia Perakis named associate deans of Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing

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      Caspar Hare and Georgia Perakis have been appointed the new associate deans of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC), a cross-cutting initiative in the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. Their new roles will take effect on Sept. 1.

      “Infusing social and ethical aspects of computing in academic research and education is a critical component of the college mission,” says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I look forward to working with Caspar and Georgia on continuing to develop and advance SERC and its reach across MIT. Their complementary backgrounds and their broad connections across MIT will be invaluable to this next chapter of SERC.”

      Caspar Hare

      Hare is a professor of philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. A member of the MIT faculty since 2003, his main interests are in ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. The general theme of his recent work has been to bring ideas about practical rationality and metaphysics to bear on issues in normative ethics and epistemology. He is the author of two books: “On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects” (Princeton University Press 2009), about the metaphysics of perspective, and “The Limits of Kindness” (Oxford University Press 2013), about normative ethics.

      Georgia Perakis

      Perakis is the William F. Pounds Professor of Management and professor of operations research, statistics, and operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she has been a faculty member since 1998. She investigates the theory and practice of analytics and its role in operations problems and is particularly interested in how to solve complex and practical problems in pricing, revenue management, supply chains, health care, transportation, and energy applications, among other areas. Since 2019, she has been the co-director of the Operations Research Center, an interdepartmental PhD program that jointly reports to MIT Sloan and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, a role in which she will remain. Perakis will also assume an associate dean role at MIT Sloan in recognition of her leadership.

      Hare and Perakis succeed David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics, and Julie Shah, the H.N. Slater Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, who will be stepping down from their roles at the conclusion of their three-year term on Aug. 31.

      “My deepest thanks to Dave and Julie for their tremendous leadership of SERC and contributions to the college as associate deans,” says Huttenlocher.

      SERC impact

      As the inaugural associate deans of SERC, Kaiser and Shah have been responsible for advancing a mission to incorporate humanist, social science, social responsibility, and civic perspectives into MIT’s teaching, research, and implementation of computing. In doing so, they have engaged dozens of faculty members and thousands of students from across MIT during these first three years of the initiative.

      They have brought together people from a broad array of disciplines to collaborate on crafting original materials such as active learning projects, homework assignments, and in-class demonstrations. A collection of these materials was recently published and is now freely available to the world via MIT OpenCourseWare.

      In February 2021, they launched the MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing for undergraduate instruction across a range of classes and fields of study. The specially commissioned and peer-reviewed cases are based on original research and are brief by design. Three issues have been published to date and a fourth will be released later this summer. Kaiser will continue to oversee the successful new series as editor.

      Last year, 60 undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs joined a community of SERC Scholars to help advance SERC efforts in the college. The scholars participate in unique opportunities throughout, such as the summer Experiential Ethics program. A multidisciplinary team of graduate students last winter worked with the instructors and teaching assistants of class 6.036 (Introduction to Machine Learning), MIT’s largest machine learning course, to infuse weekly labs with material covering ethical computing, data and model bias, and fairness in machine learning through SERC.

      Through efforts such as these, SERC has had a substantial impact at MIT and beyond. Over the course of their tenure, Kaiser and Shah have engaged about 80 faculty members, and more than 2,100 students took courses that included new SERC content in the last year alone. SERC’s reach extended well beyond engineering students, with about 500 exposed to SERC content through courses offered in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the School of Architecture and Planning. More

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      MIT to launch new Office of Research Computing and Data

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      As the computing and data needs of MIT’s research community continue to grow — both in their quantity and complexity — the Institute is launching a new effort to ensure that researchers have access to the advanced computing resources and data management services they need to do their best work. 

      At the core of this effort is the creation of the new Office of Research Computing and Data (ORCD), to be led by Professor Peter Fisher, who will step down as head of the Department of Physics to serve as the office’s inaugural director. The office, which formally opens in September, will build on and replace the MIT Research Computing Project, an initiative supported by the Office of the Vice President for Research, which contributed in recent years to improving the computing resources available to MIT researchers.

      “Almost every scientific field makes use of research computing to carry out our mission at MIT — and computing needs vary between different research groups. In my world, high-energy physics experiments need large amounts of storage and many identical general-purpose CPUs, while astrophysical theorists simulating the formation of galaxy clusters need relatively little storage, but many CPUs with high-speed connections between them,” says Fisher, the Thomas A. Frank (1977) Professor of Physics, who will take up the mantle of ORCD director on Sept. 1.

      “I envision ORCD to be, at a minimum, a centralized system with a spectrum of different capabilities to allow our MIT researchers to start their projects and understand the computational resources needed to execute them,” Fisher adds.

      The Office of Research Computing and Data will provide services spanning hardware, software, and cloud solutions, including data storage and retrieval, and offer advice, training, documentation, and data curation for MIT’s research community. It will also work to develop innovative solutions that address emerging or highly specialized needs, and it will advance strategic collaborations with industry.

      The exceptional performance of MIT’s endowment last year has provided a unique opportunity for MIT to distribute endowment funds to accelerate progress on an array of Institute priorities in fiscal year 2023, beginning July 1, 2022. On the basis of community input and visiting committee feedback, MIT’s leadership identified research computing as one such priority, enabling the expanded effort that the Institute commenced today. Future operation of ORCD will incorporate a cost-recovery model.

      In his new role, Fisher will report to Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research, and coordinate closely with MIT Information Systems and Technology (IS&T), MIT Libraries, and the deans of the five schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, among others. He will also work closely with Provost Cindy Barnhart.

      “I am thrilled that Peter has agreed to take on this important role,” says Zuber. “Under his leadership, I am confident that we’ll be able to build on the important progress of recent years to deliver to MIT researchers best-in-class infrastructure, services, and expertise so they can maximize the performance of their research.”

      MIT’s research computing capabilities have grown significantly in recent years. Ten years ago, the Institute joined with a number of other Massachusetts universities to establish the Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) in Holyoke to provide the high-performance, low-carbon computing power necessary to carry out cutting-edge research while reducing its environmental impact. MIT’s capacity at the MGHPCC is now almost fully utilized, however, and an expansion is underway.

      The need for more advanced computing capacity is not the only issue to be addressed. Over the last decade, there have been considerable advances in cloud computing, which is increasingly used in research computing, requiring the Institute to take a new look at how it works with cloud services providers and then allocates cloud resources to departments, labs, and centers. And MIT’s longstanding model for research computing — which has been mostly decentralized — can lead to inefficiencies and inequities among departments, even as it offers flexibility.

      The Institute has been carefully assessing how to address these issues for several years, including in connection with the establishment of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. In August 2019, a college task force on computing infrastructure found a “campus-wide preference for an overarching organizational model of computing infrastructure that transcends a college or school and most logically falls under senior leadership.” The task force’s report also addressed the need for a better balance between centralized and decentralized research computing resources.

      “The needs for computing infrastructure and support vary considerably across disciplines,” says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “With the new Office of Research Computing and Data, the Institute is seizing the opportunity to transform its approach to supporting research computing and data, including not only hardware and cloud computing but also expertise. This move is a critical step forward in supporting MIT’s research and scholarship.”

      Over time, ORCD (pronounced “orchid”) aims to recruit a staff of professionals, including data scientists and engineers and system and hardware administrators, who will enhance, support, and maintain MIT’s research computing infrastructure, and ensure that all researchers on campus have access to a minimum level of advanced computing and data management.

      The new research computing and data effort is part of a broader push to modernize MIT’s information technology infrastructure and systems. “We are at an inflection point, where we have a significant opportunity to invest in core needs, replace or upgrade aging systems, and respond fully to the changing needs of our faculty, students, and staff,” says Mark Silis, MIT’s vice president for information systems and technology. “We are thrilled to have a new partner in the Office of Research Computing and Data as we embark on this important work.” More

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      MIT announces five flagship projects in first-ever Climate Grand Challenges competition

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      MIT today announced the five flagship projects selected in its first-ever Climate Grand Challenges competition. These multiyear projects will define a dynamic research agenda focused on unraveling some of the toughest unsolved climate problems and bringing high-impact, science-based solutions to the world on an accelerated basis.

      Representing the most promising concepts to emerge from the two-year competition, the five flagship projects will receive additional funding and resources from MIT and others to develop their ideas and swiftly transform them into practical solutions at scale.

      “Climate Grand Challenges represents a whole-of-MIT drive to develop game-changing advances to confront the escalating climate crisis, in time to make a difference,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “We are inspired by the creativity and boldness of the flagship ideas and by their potential to make a significant contribution to the global climate response. But given the planet-wide scale of the challenge, success depends on partnership. We are eager to work with visionary leaders in every sector to accelerate this impact-oriented research, implement serious solutions at scale, and inspire others to join us in confronting this urgent challenge for humankind.”

      Brief descriptions of the five Climate Grand Challenges flagship projects are provided below.

      Bringing Computation to the Climate Challenge

      This project leverages advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data sciences to improve the accuracy of climate models and make them more useful to a variety of stakeholders — from communities to industry. The team is developing a digital twin of the Earth that harnesses more data than ever before to reduce and quantify uncertainties in climate projections.

      Research leads: Raffaele Ferrari, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and director of the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate; and Noelle Eckley Selin, director of the Technology and Policy Program and professor with a joint appointment in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

      Center for Electrification and Decarbonization of Industry

      This project seeks to reinvent and electrify the processes and materials behind hard-to-decarbonize industries like steel, cement, ammonia, and ethylene production. A new innovation hub will perform targeted fundamental research and engineering with urgency, pushing the technological envelope on electricity-driven chemical transformations.

      Research leads: Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Bilge Yıldız, the Breene M. Kerr Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering

      Preparing for a new world of weather and climate extremes

      This project addresses key gaps in knowledge about intensifying extreme events such as floods, hurricanes, and heat waves, and quantifies their long-term risk in a changing climate. The team is developing a scalable climate-change adaptation toolkit to help vulnerable communities and low-carbon energy providers prepare for these extreme weather events.

      Research leads: Kerry Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and co-director of the MIT Lorenz Center; Miho Mazereeuw, associate professor of architecture and urbanism in the Department of Architecture and director of the Urban Risk Lab; and Paul O’Gorman, professor in the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

      The Climate Resilience Early Warning System

      The CREWSnet project seeks to reinvent climate change adaptation with a novel forecasting system that empowers underserved communities to interpret local climate risk, proactively plan for their futures incorporating resilience strategies, and minimize losses. CREWSnet will initially be demonstrated in southwestern Bangladesh, serving as a model for similarly threatened regions around the world.

      Research leads: John Aldridge, assistant leader of the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and Elfatih Eltahir, the H.M. King Bhumibol Professor of Hydrology and Climate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

      Revolutionizing agriculture with low-emissions, resilient crops

      This project works to revolutionize the agricultural sector with climate-resilient crops and fertilizers that have the ability to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from food production.

      Research lead: Christopher Voigt, the Daniel I.C. Wang Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering

      “As one of the world’s leading institutions of research and innovation, it is incumbent upon MIT to draw on our depth of knowledge, ingenuity, and ambition to tackle the hard climate problems now confronting the world,” says Richard Lester, MIT associate provost for international activities. “Together with collaborators across industry, finance, community, and government, the Climate Grand Challenges teams are looking to develop and implement high-impact, path-breaking climate solutions rapidly and at a grand scale.”

      The initial call for ideas in 2020 yielded nearly 100 letters of interest from almost 400 faculty members and senior researchers, representing 90 percent of MIT departments. After an extensive evaluation, 27 finalist teams received a total of $2.7 million to develop comprehensive research and innovation plans. The projects address four broad research themes:

      To select the winning projects, research plans were reviewed by panels of international experts representing relevant scientific and technical domains as well as experts in processes and policies for innovation and scalability.

      “In response to climate change, the world really needs to do two things quickly: deploy the solutions we already have much more widely, and develop new solutions that are urgently needed to tackle this intensifying threat,” says Maria Zuber, MIT vice president for research. “These five flagship projects exemplify MIT’s strong determination to bring its knowledge and expertise to bear in generating new ideas and solutions that will help solve the climate problem.”

      “The Climate Grand Challenges flagship projects set a new standard for inclusive climate solutions that can be adapted and implemented across the globe,” says MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles. “This competition propels the entire MIT research community — faculty, students, postdocs, and staff — to act with urgency around a worsening climate crisis, and I look forward to seeing the difference these projects can make.”

      “MIT’s efforts on climate research amid the climate crisis was a primary reason that I chose to attend MIT, and remains a reason that I view the Institute favorably. MIT has a clear opportunity to be a thought leader in the climate space in our own MIT way, which is why CGC fits in so well,” says senior Megan Xu, who served on the Climate Grand Challenges student committee and is studying ways to make the food system more sustainable.

      The Climate Grand Challenges competition is a key initiative of “Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade,” which the Institute published in May 2021. Fast Forward outlines MIT’s comprehensive plan for helping the world address the climate crisis. It consists of five broad areas of action: sparking innovation, educating future generations, informing and leveraging government action, reducing MIT’s own climate impact, and uniting and coordinating all of MIT’s climate efforts. More

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      in Data Management & Statistics

      Devavrat Shah appointed faculty director of the Deshpande Center

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      Devavrat Shah, the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, has been named faculty director of the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovations. The new role took effect on Feb. 1.

      Shah replaces Tim Swager, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry, who has held the position of faculty director since 2014. Working alongside Executive Director to the Deshpande Center Leon Sandler, Swager helped the Deshpande Center build an inclusive environment where innovation and entrepreneurship could thrive. By examining new models for directing, seeding, and fostering the commercialization of inventions and technology, Swager helped students and faculty breathe life into research, propelling it out of the lab and into the world as successful ventures.

      The MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovations is an interdepartmental center working to empower MIT’s most talented students and faculty by helping them bring new innovative technologies from the lab to the marketplace in the form of breakthrough products and new companies. Desh Deshpande founded the center with his wife, in 2002.

      “Professor Shah’s deep entrepreneurial experience coupled with his research on large complex networks will be tremendous assets to the center,” says Deshpande. “Devavrat is an impactful educator and inspiring mentor who will play a key role in the center’s mission to foster innovation and accelerate the impact of new discoveries.”

      Shah joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2005. With research focusing on statistical inference and stochastic networks, his research contributions span a variety of areas including resource allocation in communications networks, inference and learning on graphical models, algorithms for social data processing including ranking, recommendations and crowdsourcing, and more recently, causal inference using observational and experimental data.  

      While Shah’s work spans a range of areas across electrical engineering, computer science, and operations research, they are all tied together with the singular focus on developing algorithmic solutions for practical, challenging problems. He’s also authored two books, one on gossip algorithms in 2006 and the other on prediction methods of nearest neighbors in 2018. 

      A highly regarded teacher, Shah has been very active in curriculum development — most notably class 6.438 (Algorithms for Inference) and class 6.401 (Introduction to Statistical Data Analysis) — and has taken a leading role in developing educational programs in the statistics and data science at MIT as part of the Statistics and Data Science Center within the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

      “With his experience and contributions as a researcher, educator, and innovator, I have no doubt that Devavrat will excel as the next faculty director of the Deshpande Center and help usher in the next era of innovation for MIT,” says Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I am grateful to Tim for the tremendous work he has done during his eight years as faculty director of the Deshpande Center. His commitment to building an inclusive environment for innovation and entrepreneurship to thrive was particularly impressive.” 

      A practiced entrepreneur, Shah co-founded Celect, Inc. — now part of Nike — in 2013, to help retailers accurately predict demand using omnichannel data. In 2019, he helped start IkigaiLabs, where he serves as CTO, with the mission to build self-driving organizations by enabling data-driven operations with human-in-the-loop with the ease of spreadsheet.

      Among his many achievements and accolades, Shah was named a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Science in 2014 and was just recently announced as an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow for 2022. He’s also received a number of awards for his papers from INFORMS Applied Probability Society, INFORMS Management Science and Operations Management, NeurIPS, ACM Sigmetrics, and IEEE Infocom. His career prizes include the Erlang Prize from INFORMS Applied Probability Society and the Rising Star Award from ACM Sigmetrics. Shah has also received multiple Test of Time paper awards from ACM Sigmetrics and is recognized as a distinguished alumnus of his alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

      “The Deshpande Center thanks Tim for his years of service as faculty director,” says the center’s executive director, Leon Sandler. “Tim’s commitment to innovation played an integral role in our success, and the center’s programs have thrived under his leadership. I look forward to working with Devavrat in the continuing effort to fulfill the mission of our center.”

      As part of his new post, Shah will work closely with Sandler, who has held the executive director position at the Deshpande Center since 2006. More